Memory, Testimony and the Imagination: Jerry Berman’s Letters
Paper for ASN Annual World Convention 22–24 May 2025.
Visitors to Ukraine who documented the Holodomor. Image: Author, 2025.
ABSTRACT
This paper explores artistic responses to Ukrainian histories using Lawrence L. Langer’s theories of the literary imagination as a starting point. The claim of art’s importance to bridge literal truth with imaginative reality is central to Langer’s arguments on the role of creative work following atrocity. Exploring debates on memory politics and the visual arts I focus on witness testimony from Holodomor, the Great Famine in Ukraine, 1932–33, letters from South African engineer, Jerry Berman. This collection spans Ukraine, South Africa, London and New York, providing objective and subjective accounts of the period. Results of the project are a digital archive. I am exploring the role of the artist, as Langer describes, responsible for finding style and form to represent the atmosphere of the work. [1]
This practice-based research relies on literature exploring the importance of oral traditions and testimony. In particular, Rebecca Comay’s work on commemoration and memorialisation in art. Like Langer, Comay explores possibilities after Adorno’s statements on the impossibility of art after Auschwitz. [2] Precedents for the project include The Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, an online archive using digital genetic editing. [3] The focus of the project is not to memorialise Holodomor but to use technology to undo rather than threaten the silences of the 20th century.
The paper focuses on personal testimony and its role in disrupting established norms. I present work in progress including data analysis, XML coding to future-proof the archive and prototypes of the final work – due to launch in summer 2026.
1 Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 1–30.
2 Rebecca Comay, “Material Remains: Doris Salcedo,” The Oxford Literary Review 39.1 (2017): 42–45, https://www.euppublishing. com/doi/abs/10.3366/olr.2017.0209
3 “Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project” Edited by Dirk Van Hille, Mark Nixon and Vincent Neyt, accessed April 24, 2025, https://www.beckettarchive.org/